We stopped at Spring Hollow to go rockhounding. It's a pretty accessible spot low down in Logan Canyon. There's a campground at the mouth of the hollow, but it's not marked very well. A book we've got said that it's a very good spot to look for fossils, so we thought we would check it out.
We parked in the parking lot on the south side of the river. There were a few fishermen and others about, so I walked over to the signboard to see if it listed the Spring Hollow Trail. It didn't. We wandered up the road anyway. Fortunately, at the turnoff to the group campsites, a sign indicated that the to follow the road up past the group sites and the trail would begin at the end of the road.
The folks in Group Site B were cooking breakfast as we hiked by. We waved and kept on going. The trailhead started at a small bridge that crossed the creek. Soon after, the trail got steep quite quickly. The book said that the fossils were about 1/2 mile up, but about 1/4 mile past the bridge we spotted a few in the rocks beside the trail. We kept hiking. Soon, we reached a spot where the vegetation cleared back from the trail a little bit, and a lot of the area was covered in rockslides. We hiked 50 feet off the trail, then started looking.
It was a bonanza! There were fossils all over the place! We found horn coral, pipe coral, shells, crinoid stem segments, etc. As we scoured the area, we began noticing a trend. The lighter gray limestone had a lot of fossils, while the darker greyish-brown rock didn't have any fossils. We looked for a while, frequently calling the other over to check out our latest and greatest fossil find. Pretty soon, we gathered the fossils, then sat down and decided to weed them out and only bring the best ones home. We came home with some pretty good looking fossils. I'm sure if we spent more time we could have found even better ones.
Nearest City: Logan, UT
Location: N° W°
Time Needed: 1.5 hours
Difficulty: Moderate
Kid Friendly: Yes
Additional Info:
Thank you!
ReplyDelete